FORGED: Making a Knife with Traditional Blacksmith Skills

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Forging in the Traditional Way
Forging is forging is forging, traditional or “modern”, hand-held hammer, power
hammer, hydraulic press or what-have-you. Forging is forging. However, forging
a knife in the traditional way is not just pounding a piece of steel into a rough
blade-like shape, laying the hammer down, and then grinding to completion.
Traditional forging means little or no stock removal by grinding, and shaping
with hammer alone.
Historically the smith forged much the same as we do, the difference being, he
ground much less or not at all. Other than files, hand-stones or a foot or hand
cranked sharpening round stone he had no grinding method or apparatus that
could come close to a modern stone or belt grinder. He formed knives and set
their bevels with only his hammer. He connected converging lines and dissimilar
thicknesses while maintaining overall balance and weight. He honored complex
blade geometry and final surface appearance while sustaining the desired width
and breadth from pommel to tip, all the while keeping everything straight and
true without burning it up. Traditionally the smith put more time and hammer
strikes on the front end of the project and less time on the back end without
major stock removal in the completion of his knife.
TIP: Watch some videos of farriers making tongs, forge tools and horseshoes. That
is traditional blacksmithing! Also view videos of Alec Steele making his threepound
hammers. They give the rest of us an idea of what traditional forging is all
about. It’s about hammer control, eye-hand coordination, speed, power and most
importantly, telling the steel where to go.
Old-Timers and Their Forging Techniques
The old-timers forged their blades this way for three reasons:
The first was that iron and especially steel were, for many centuries, precious
materials (i.e. hard to come by) until the Bessemer process came along in 1856.
Smiths were not about to grind away, even if they could, half of what cost so much.
Since the beginning, forge welding a steel bit into the edge of an iron ax, chisel or
knife saved steel. Conservation of material was paramount to the smith because
there was so little of it. Even well into the 19th century, rural smiths made their
steel go as far as it could. One of my favorite memories was helping Ben Deal
point a plow with an old rasp (note: both Jim and Ben Deal had acquired Rural
Blacksmithing degrees from Tuskegee University in Alabama shortly after WWI).
The second was that the complex process of bringing power and abrasives,
usually sandstone, together in a readily available and dependable form was
not always available to the frontier blacksmith. There were examples in history
where independent smiths or other craftsmen developed ingenious devices and
contraptions for forming metal and wood but they were not in the mainstream
of development and production.